The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (45 page)

Politically, the Australian colonies were organized on democratic lines—complicated at first by the proportion of convicts in the population—and innovated voting by secret ballot, which was adopted by several of the colonies in 1856. By the end of the nineteenth century (Tasmania being the last Australian colony to sign on), every man who was a British subject could cast a ballot. Perhaps because they wanted to attract more sheilas, New Zealand and Australia were leaders in granting women the right to vote. In Australia, a woman's right to vote varied by colony and was sometimes limited by qualifications (such as owning property).
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When it came to granting universal suffrage to women, New Zealand struck first—not just in the British Empire in the South Pacific, but in the world—in 1893.

In 1901, the Australian colonies confederated as the Australian Commonwealth. Australians felt a growing sense of nationhood and recognized—especially because of Chinese immigration during the Gold Rush—that Australia was a British island in an Asian sea. Even with the massive influx of gold-fevered immigrants, Australia remained overwhelmingly British, and was determined to remain so, enacting the “White Australia” policy to discourage non-whites from entering Australia. Because the British would not allow a starkly racial policy, Australian immigration law was based on passing a literacy test in a European language of the Australian immigration officials' choosing, the choice almost invariably being
a language that might stump any non-white would-be immigrant. The restrictions were gradually relaxed, in piecemeal fashion, after World War II, rapidly in the 1960s, and were fully repealed by 1973.

Australia eagerly took up imperial responsibilities, contributing troops to the Boer War in South Africa (16,000 of them), taking over as a colonial power itself in Papua New Guinea in 1902 (a British protectorate since 1884), and most of all joining the fighting in the First World War—with the Gallipoli campaign becoming part of Australia's national myth. Out of a total population of 5 million, some 330,000 Australian men served overseas in the Great War and suffered the highest casualty rate of any Western force (65 percent),
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earning Australia its own place at the Versailles Peace Conference, represented by its prime minister, William Morris “Billy” “Little Digger” Hughes, and his deputy and former prime minister Joseph Cook. Hughes was a nationalist, a socialist, and an Empire loyalist: “Without the Empire we should be tossed like a cork in the cross currents of world politics. It is at once our sword and our shield.”
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He helped ensure that German New Guinea, Nauru, and the Bismarck islands (including the Admiralty Islands, New Ireland, and New Britain) went to Australia and German Samoa went to New Zealand as mandated territories. Australia also gained its own seat at the League of Nations, though Hughes rightly thought the League was a crock.

In 1931 Britain gave Australia (as well as Canada, Ireland, South Africa, New Zealand, and Newfoundland) dominion status as an equal and self-governing part of the British Empire. The Australians themselves, however, were so little interested in this change of status that their legislature did not approve the measure until 1942—because of the Second World War—and New Zealand did not approve it until after the war, in 1947.

The keystone of British defenses in the Pacific was allegedly impregnable Singapore—except for the fact that Singapore fell to the Japanese on 15 February 1942. With British Malaya overrun, Singapore lost (Churchill called it “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history”
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), and Britain's two great Pacific battleships, HMS
Repulse
and HMS
Prince of Wales
,
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sunk by the Japanese (on 10 December 1941), Australia had to look to the United States as its chief effective ally in the Pacific to stave off
a Japanese invasion. On 27 December 1941, Australian Prime Minister John Curtin announced in the pages of
The Melbourne Herald,
“The Australian Government regards the Pacific struggle as primarily one in which the United States and Australia must have the fullest say in the direction of the Democracies' fighting plan. Without any inhibitions of any kind, I must make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links of kinship with the United Kingdom.”
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To that end, Curtin put Australia's Pacific force under the command of American General Douglas MacArthur.

Nevertheless, as part of the British Empire, Australia itself acted as a world power, with its troops deployed against Axis forces in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Sixty thousand Australians had been killed in World War I. Despite sending 200,000 more men overseas than it had in the First World War, Australia lost just under 40,000 dead in World War II—8,000 of them perishing in Japanese prison camps.

After the war, the Australian government felt more acutely than ever that demography is destiny and made an aggressive play to attract European immigrants in general and British immigrants in particular; from 1946 to 1949, 700,000 aspiring Australians arrived. What they found was a country that, despite its notoriously Bolshie unions, was profoundly conservative. Robert Menzies of the Liberal Party (Australia's leading conservative party) governed as prime minister from 1949 to 1966 in coalition with the rural conservative Country Party (now the National Party). The economy boomed, Australian foreign policy was resolutely pro-British, pro-American, and anti-Communist, and in 1951 Australia and New Zealand cemented their wartime alliance with the United States in the ANZUS Security Treaty. Australia was also a member of SEATO, the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (1954–77), an Asian version of NATO—its original members consisted of the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, France, Pakistan, and Thailand—that dissolved with France's declining power,
Britain's decision to curtail its commitments east of Suez, and Pakistan's withdrawal after the secession of Bangladesh. It nevertheless provided part of the rationale for America, Australia, and New Zealand's defense of South Vietnam against Communist aggression (as did ANZUS).

Britain's residual authority over Australia was demonstrated in 1975 when Governor-General John Kerr, representing Her Majesty the Queen (though actually appointed by Australia's then-Prime Minister Gough Whitlam), dismissed Whitlam, leader of the Labour Party, as prime minister (he had been in office since December 1972) because his spendthrift ways had forced an apparently insoluble government budget crisis. Kerr appointed an interim government under the Liberal Party's Malcolm Fraser and ordered an election, which Fraser won in a landslide. An attempt to turn Australia into a republic—removed from the queen's authority—was defeated in a national referendum in 1999. The only change, occurring in 1974 during Gough Whitlam's Labour government, was that
Advance Australia Fair
replaced
God Save the Queen
as the national anthem—not the best choice, but a forgivable one.

For the British in Australia, New Zealand started as a whaling and seal-hunting station. Then came missionaries who saw the cannibal Maoris and their white ruffian friends as souls to be saved. The Maoris gained the essentials of civilization—potatoes (introduced by Captain Cook) and muskets—and proceeded to feast on the one and prey on their tribal neighbors with the other in the so-called Musket Wars (1807–42). Fun-with-muskets reduced Maori numbers by possibly a third.

New Zealand in the first half of the nineteenth century was a pretty rough place. The Christian missionaries helped change that. The Christians taught, shockingly, that cannibalism was bad, that treating women
as items of sexual barter was improper, and that selfishness was wrong. The missionaries also gave the Maori a written language, medical care, and an example of peaceful service.

The other saving grace for New Zealand was its incorporation into the British Empire with the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. Signed by more than 500 Maori tribal chiefs, the treaty provided New Zealand with a British governor and gave Maoris the rights of Englishmen (only up to a point, in practice). Under the protection of the Union Jack, New Zealand became an attractive prospect for immigrants from the British Isles and elsewhere. Just as the Maoris had enjoyed the company of the jolly jack tars with whom they first traded, they found more respectable settlers fine trading partners, and early New Zealand prospered.

But lurking beneath the Maori farmer was the warrior, and as white immigrants showed a voracious hunger for land (though they still only inhabited twenty percent of it), some Maoris began to show their teeth. The Maori Wars were limited to the North Island of New Zealand, where the vast majority of the Maori lived. They ranged from early skirmishes in the 1840s, to battles involving British regulars in the early 1860s, to minor émeutes that lasted until around 1872. The hostile Maoris were a hard and challenging foe, though most Maoris supported the British and were willing to fight for them. Given their experience in the “Musket Wars,” they were useful allies.

Once the wars were over, New Zealand's settlers turned the country into a most prosperous democratic colony. Miners struck gold on the South Island while on the North the land was dominated by farmers and sheep. In the 1880s, with the advent of refrigerated shipping, New Zealand became a large-scale exporter of meat and dairy products. It also happily shipped soldiers—including warrior Maoris—to serve the Empire whenever required. New Zealand sent as many troops, in proportion to population, to the Boer War in South Africa as Britain did. In the First World War about
a third of New Zealand's total male population between the ages of twenty and forty were casualties (killed or wounded). When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, there was no doubt that New Zealand would be at Britannia's side. Michael Joseph Savage, New Zealand's first Labour Party prime minister, elected in 1935 and serving until his death in 1940, said, “Both with gratitude for the past, and with confidence in the future, we range ourselves without fear beside Britain. Where she goes, we go, where she stands, we stand.”
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After the war, the Kiwis proved equally as martial as the Aussies, sending troops to Korea, Malaya, Borneo, and Vietnam.

After the Vietnam War, New Zealand's political climate, always liberal, turned decidedly leftish (while maintaining a market-oriented economy). In 1984, New Zealand's Labour government declared the country a “nuclear-free zone” and tried to pretend it was a trendy, fashionable non-aligned nation. Later, though, Kiwi troops were sent to the war in Afghanistan and Kiwi medical and engineering units were sent to join Allied forces in the Iraq War. The New Zealand Labour Party goes turn and turnabout with the conservative National Party, and the country remains an important member of the British Commonwealth, whose Far Eastern membership includes: Brunei, Kiribati, Malaysia, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Singapore, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, and occasionally Fiji.